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Working Paper No. 60, 2013
Differences of Inequality
Tracing the Socioeconomic, the Cultural and the
Political in Latin American Postcolonial Theory
Ina Kerner
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Differences of Inequality
Tracing the Socioeconomic, the Cultural and the Political in Latin American
Postcolonial Theory
Ina Kerner
Abstract
It is far from obvious which theories are the most promising ones for the task of critically
addressing interdependent inequalities in Latin America as well as global forms of
inequality that affect Latin American countries. In this working paper, I look at Latin
American postcolonial theories in this respect. Following Nancy Fraser’s analytic
distinction of socioeconomic, cultural and political aspects of injustice, and affirmative
as well as transformative remedies against them, I undertake a two-sided operation.
In a first step, I use Fraser’s framework to shed light on the accounts of inequality that
we can gain from the work of Aníbal Quijano, María Lugones and Walter Mignolo. In a
second step, I tease out in which ways these accounts transcend and thus challenge
the framework used on them.
Keywords: postcolonial theory | decolonial thought | justice theory
Biography
Ina Kerner is Assistant Professor for Diversity Politics at the Institute of Social Sciences
of Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. She studied Political Science, History and Philosophy
in Bonn, Quetzaltenango, Chapel Hill and at Freie Universität Berlin, where she later
had her first teaching appointment in Political Theory and received her Ph.D. in Political
Science. Before moving on to Humboldt-Universität, she was Assistant Professor for
Women’s and Gender Studies at Technische Universität Berlin and Visiting Assistant
Professor at the New School for Social Research in New York. Within the last years,
she has also been a Visiting Lecturer at Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad and a
Visiting Fellow at the Center for Humanities Research at the University of the Western
Cape in Cape Town. From October 2012 until March 2013 she was a Fellow at
desiguALdades.net in Research Dimension IV: Theory and Methodology. Her work is
mostly situated within the field of Political Theory; currently, her predominant research
interests cover Postcolonial Theories and their integration into the Social Sciences,
Feminist Theory and Intersectionality, as well as issues of diversity understood in a broad
sense. She is the author of monographs on Postcolonial Theory and on intersections
of racism and sexism (all in German) and the co-editor of volumes in the fields of
Political Theory and of Gender Studies. Her journal publications include: “Questions
of Intersectionality: Reflections on the Current Debate in German Gender Studies”,
in: European Journal of Women’s Studies 19, 2, 2012; “Tudo é interseccional? Sobre
a relação entre racismo e sexismo”, in: Novos Estudos 93, 2012 and “Más allá de
la unidimensionalidad. Conceptualizando la relación entre el racismo y el sexismo”,
in: Signos Filosóficos, XI, 21, 2009; “Scales of Justice and the Challenges of Global
Governmentality”, in: Public Reason 2, 2, 2010, as well as “Challenges of Critical
Whiteness Studies”, in: translate.eipcp.net, 2007.
Contents
1.
Introduction 1
2.
Nancy Fraser: Elements of Injustice 2
3.
Basic Features of Postcolonial Studies and of Decolonial
Thought
5
4.
Aníbal Quijano: From Dependency to Decolonial Thought
8
5.
María Lugones: Bringing Gender In
13
6.
Walter Mignolo: Modernity/Coloniality and the Decolonial
Option
16
7.
Differences of Inequality and their Critique: Quijano, Lugones
and Mignolo
20
8.
Blurring Distinctions, Decolonizing Inequality Research
24
9.
Bibliography27
desiguALdades.net Working Paper Series No. 60, 2013 | 1
1.
Introduction
The inequalities that shape our current world are manifold. They come in a large variety
of forms and entangle in various ways. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that critical
assessments and theorizations of these manifold, entangled inequalities, as well
as struggles against them, differ considerably among each other, as well. So which
of the large variety of theorizations should we embrace when we are interested in
illuminating interdependent inequalities in Latin America as well as global inequalities
that in one way or another affect Latin American contexts? Which of the accounts on
offer permit us to critically assess current forms of inequality in a way that is mindful
of their complexities? Which theoretical resources should we draw upon when we
attempt to understand not only what the factors are that put present-day interdependent
inequalities in place, but also how the precise nature of interdependency, the form it
takes on, looks like? Driven by these questions, in this paper I will look at selected
Latin American postcolonial theories for the answers they offer: segments of the work
of Aníbal Quijano, María Lugones and Walter Mignolo. All three authors address
inequalities in Latin America in an intertwined way. All three of them are driven by basic
insights into intersectionality. Furthermore, in considerably distinct ways, they draw
upon as well as transcend dependency theory: Quijano by analytically connecting
class and “race” issues, Lugones by further complicating Quijano’s account by way of
systematically integrating matters of gender, Mignolo, finally, by surpassing the “race”/
class/gender triad altogether.
But before turning to the inherently intertwined assessments of inequalities by Quijano,
Lugones and Mignolo, I will focus on a very different theoretical approach: U.S. critical
theorist Nancy Fraser’s two- and later three-dimensional framework of justice in which
she distinguishes and addresses socioeconomic, cultural and political aspects of
justice and injustice. For the purpose of this paper, for two reasons Fraser’s approach
is of particular interest, even though – or maybe: precisely because – its direct frame of
reference is rather movement politics and justice theory than the sociology of inequality.
First, I hold that Fraser in fact does address inequalities, but does so in an indirect
way, namely from a perspective that opposes them and tries to overcome them: In her
theorizing, she either draws on activist claims for redistribution and/or recognition, or
engages normative justice reasoning to identify the range of those forms of inequalities
that have to be qualified as unjust, as well as those forms of remedy, of transformation
and change, that promise to be most far-reaching and enduring. By this, she offers
us a perspective on inequality that goes beyond mere comprehension, as it not
only integrates questions regarding possible political consequences of the analysis
presented, but critically looks at possible challenges and outcomes, at the strengths
Kerner - Differences of Inequality | 2
and flaws of such consequences as well. Second, she tackles her subject matter by way
of analytically dissecting it, by identifying and distinguishing its constitutive elements.
Thereby, she manages to offer a heuristic framework of (the) major aspects one might
want to have in mind when looking at a particular case of entangled inequalities in the
attempt to grasp its scope and to understand its workings.
2.
Nancy Fraser: Elements of Injustice
In the mid-1990s, Nancy Fraser suggested to heuristically distinguish socioeconomic
and cultural elements of current struggles against inequalities, which correspond to
claims for redistribution and for recognition respectively. Among the purposes of this
distinction was her intention to overcome what she perceived as a problematic split
between socioeconomic perspectives on social justice (often, but not exclusively in
the tradition of Marxist thought) and takes on social justice that were informed by
either identity politics or by poststructuralist conceptions of the power of the discursive
and the cultural; in other words, a split between economist perspectives on social
justice and culturalist ones (Fraser 1995). Fraser’s distinction, or rather her claim
that socioeconomic and cultural aspects of justice and unjust inequalities should be
addressed in conjunction, has been met with much positive resonance, both in the
realm of social justice movements and of critical social and political theory (for the
latter, cf. Fraser 2008a), and far beyond the U.S. and the rest of the Anglophone world.
In her framework, Fraser did not only suggest the combined discussion of redistributionoriented and recognition-oriented approaches to overcome injustice. She introduced
a further distinction that applies both to claims for redistribution and to claims for
recognition: she distinguishes affirmative from transformative accounts. Affirmative
remedies aim at “correcting inequitable outcomes of social arrangements without
disturbing the underlying framework that generates them” – concerning redistributive
issues, this is “the liberal welfare state”, concerning matters of recognition, “mainstream
multiculturalism” (Fraser 1995: 82, 87). Transformative remedies, in contrast, aim at
“correcting inequitable outcomes precisely by restructuring the underlying generative
framework” – “socialism” with reference to socioeconomic forms of injustice,
“deconstruction” with reference to cultural ones (Fraser 1995: 82, 87).1
In her more recent work, Fraser has considerably enlarged this framework – precisely
in an attempt to overcome methodological nationalism, or, in her own words, “passé
Westphalianism” (Fraser 2008b: 71), which had implicitly shaped her earlier framework.
1 For a discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of the respective remedies, see also Fraser
and Honneth (2003: 13-128).
Based on the assumption that in a globalizing world, the nation state is not the obvious
frame of considerations about redressing injustice anymore, Fraser has argued that
the question of who is implied and should be involved in such considerations was now
an open one and in fact a new problem of justice itself.2 To be able to address this new
problem, she has added the third dimension of representation to her redistributioncum-recognition model: the dimension of representation. With her enlarged framework,
she now allows us to focus on socioeconomic, cultural as well as on political forms of
injustice.
Forms of injustice that concern the political are not uniform, though. Fraser
distinguishes three levels of such types of injustice. The first level – already known
with regard to the nation state and thus from Westphalian times – relates to issues of
“ordinary-political misrepresentation” which refer to political decision rules that deny
full political participation to some individuals or groups within a given frame (Fraser
2008b: 18f.). The second level of injustice, which became widely visible only with
globalization, is “misframing” and refers to the way in which a political community’s
boundaries are set; the basic diagnosis here is that in a globalizing world, the nation
state does not always serve as the appropriate frame for addressing issues of justice
anymore (Fraser 2008b: 19ff.). The third level of political injustice, finally, concerns
what Fraser calls the “grammar of frame-setting” (Fraser 2008b: 25) and consists in
“meta-political misrepresentation”, the failure to institutionalize “parity of participation”
in deliberations and decisions concerning the “who” of justice, thus concerning the
appropriate framing and internal rules of the units within which justice claims are to be
taken up (Fraser 2008b: 26).
Against this backdrop, she again distinguishes affirmative from transformative modes
of the politics of framing. According to her, affirmative politics of framing “contest the
boundaries of existing frames while accepting the Westphalian grammar of framesetting” – in other words, they accept the “state-territorial principle” but not the way it
is applied (Fraser 2008b: 22f.). Such claims are expressed for instance by nationalist
separation movements. Transformative politics of framing, by contrast, contest the idea
that the nation state is the adequate frame for all issues of inequality and injustice. They
hold that problems of transnational reach, for example problems stemming from the
financial market, or problems related to climate or to drug politics, can precisely not be
undone by nation state action alone. Therefore, transformative politics of framing aim
2 One might question Fraser’s assumption that the problem of the frame was a new one, arising only
with late 20th century processes of globalization, and not a problem that already came into being in
the late 15th century, when European colonialism began – even if, or rather: especially since current
normative political theory answers to this problem and those answers that were developed and
implemented throughout the last centuries by colonial administrations and later by the various actors
of geopolitics, differ significantly.
“to change the deep grammar of frame-setting in a globalizing world” (Fraser 2008b:
23). This is to be achieved by supplementing existing decision making procedures
tied to the nation state by procedures that transcend them. Fraser does not suggest a
concrete institutional setup at this point, but rather introduces the “all-affected-principle”
as a normative criterion for deciding who is to participate around a particular issue and
who is not. To give an example, she speaks of “environmentalists and indigenous
peoples” who claim “standing as subjects of justice in relation to the extra- and nonterritorial powers that impinge on their lives” (Fraser 2008b: 25).
Taken together, what we can gain from Fraser’s approach is a panorama of three
distinct aspects of inequality – socioeconomic, cultural as well as political aspects –
and six forms of remedy, of ways to overcome the aspects of inequality mentioned: for
each aspect, an affirmative and a transformative way.
Table 1: Aspects of Inequality and Forms of Remedy according to Fraser
Aspects of Socioeconomic
Inequality (Redistribution)
Cultural
(Recognition)
Political
(Representation)
Forms of
Remedy
Affirmative
Liberal welfare
state
Mainstream
multiculturalism
Separation
Transformative
Socialism
Deconstruction
Supplementation/
Transgression of
nation-state frame
Source: Own elaboration based on Fraser (2008b).
If we set out to assess inequalities both with regard to the “entanglements between
social processes at different geographical levels: local, national, global” and with
regard to “the relationship between different axes of stratification” (Costa 2011: 9),
Fraser’s heuristic framework promises to decidedly help us clarifying both the scope
and possibly relevant elements of what we look at when looking at social processes and
axes of stratification. Nevertheless her approach does not answer all of the questions
that one might have regarding interdependent inequalities. As already indicated above,
with her clear normative focus, Fraser predominantly aims at identifying and qualifying
unjust aspects of inequality and at assessing strategies to overcome them. Particularly
in its more recent, globalized version, her account is in the first place a contribution
to scholarship in the realm of global justice theory which aims at providing convincing
criteria for assessing why – or why not – a particular constellation should be considered
as unjust, and therefore in need for change. Fraser seems less interested in also
contributing to research on the emergence and on current configurations of entangled
forms of inequality.
In this, she differs from Latin American social science scholarship on inequalities, which
for some time now aims at combining structure-oriented approaches with approaches
focusing on knowledge and culture, and which doing so focuses on socioeconomic
aspects of inequality as well as on cultural ones – precisely with an explicit interest
in the history, or one might say: the genealogy of the interdependent inequalities that
are focused on. This holds particularly true for Latin American postcolonial theories,
or, to use a label which is used by several of the protagonists of such theorizing in
order to differentiate it from postcolonial theories stemming from or focusing on world
regions different from Latin America, for decolonial thought. To outline basic premises
of decolonial thought, in the next section I will first briefly characterize the much broader
field of postcolonial studies, before narrowing it down to those aspects of it that are the
focus of this paper.
3. Basic Features of Postcolonial Studies and of Decolonial
Thought
Generally speaking, postcolonial studies comprise a diverse field of theoretical and
empirical work that critically addresses long-term effects of European colonialism as
well as the effects of comparable or related forms of imperialism. Postcolonial studies
are undertaken with regard to former colonies – or, to use a term popularized by
Achille Mbembe: to postcolonies (Mbembe 2001) – as well as with regard to former
metropoles. Additionally, postcolonial approaches have fruitfully been applied to
transnational relations and configurations as well as to countries and regions that
were not directly involved in colonial endeavors themselves, such as for instance
Switzerland (cf. Purtschert, Lüthi, and Falk 2012), but that nevertheless show traces
of colonial modes of thought. So it is possible to say that the scope of postcolonial
studies is worldwide and comprises the entire globe. Despite its tremendous range
and considerable differences within this academic field, I hold that postcolonial studies
share three primary concerns.3
First, they acknowledge that our global, postcolonial world as we know it is in fact the
result of historical processes. This implies assessing, and taking serious, the influences
of European colonialism on current forms of political, social and economic structures as
3 For a much more extended take on the diversity of postcolonial studies, see Kerner (2012a).
well as on current patterns of thought; it also implies to take into account and to study
contemporary re-actualizations of colonialism and imperialism. Thereby, postcolonial
studies oppose all attempts at de-historicizing and naturalizing – for instance by means
of ethnicization – forms of life or any other state of affairs. This applies particularly to
the Global South, to the world regions that within Euro-Atlantic, or, in other words,
European and North American thought have a long tradition of being de-historicized,
naturalized and thus fixated.
The second major concern of postcolonial studies is a focus on global
interdependencies and entanglements, both historically and current (cf. Randeria
w1999; Bhambra 2007). With this, they challenge assumptions and accounts of
autonomous developments, not only, but particularly in Europe. Thereby, they counter
both modernization theories that locate the motor of world history exclusively in
Europe, and notions of multiple modernities that in fact do acknowledge formations of
high civilization outside of Europe, but nevertheless stress predominantly autonomous
processes of the respective coming into being of this world’s multiple modernities.
Third, finally, postcolonial studies critically assess and address North-South power
relations and asymmetries. Doing this, they explicitly focus on discursive aspects, thus
differing from some of the former materialist accounts of world affairs, insights of which
are gradually being brought back in, though; therefore, one can say that particularly
since what has been called the “materialist turn” in postcolonial studies (Procter 2007:
173), they attempt at looking at discursive and material, particularly economic aspects
of global power relations in conjunction.
All three aspects hold particularly true for postcolonial theories stemming from, or
focusing on, Latin America.4 According to Fernando Coronil, who suggests a broad
understanding of Latin American postcolonial studies as “research into and analysis of
the historical trajectory of societies and populations subjected to diverse modalities of
power”, the field is characterized by bringing together the critical analysis of occidentalist
representations of cultural difference, the study of historical transformations after
political independence and the analysis of contemporary imperialism and its manifold
4 It is noteworthy that many of the most widely read authors working in the realm of Latin American
postcolonial studies teach in the U.S. This applies to Aníbal Quijano, who originates from Peru
and relatively late in his life took up an appointment at Binghamton University; to his Binghamton
colleague María Lugones, who grew up in Argentina but already received her academic training
in the U.S., as well as to Walter Mignolo, who comes from the same country and teaches at Duke
University; it also applied to Venezuela-born Fernando Coronil.
effects (Coronil 2004: 240).5 Thus, it encompasses works by the dependency school
and the philosophy of liberation as well as research associated with the Latin American
Subaltern Studies group and with the modernidad/colonialidad paradigm. It therefore
does not only combine socioeconomic, cultural and political aspects, but also does this
in a way that clearly focuses on both the history of these aspects and, connected to
this, the global context of inequality on the regional, national and local level.6
But how exactly are the socioeconomic, the cultural, the political as well as their relation
conceptualized in these accounts? Which aspects of inequality are addressed, which
ones are being left out? And how can the counter-perspectives presented, the ideas
about how to best deal with, escape or fight inequalities, be described with regard to the
selected accounts? In order to be able to answer these questions, in what follows I will
particularly focus on the content as well as on the conceptualizations that can be found
in the selected accounts of Quijano, Lugones and Mignolo; in other words, I will focus
on the what-question as well as on the how-question of interdependent inequalities.7
With regard to content, what is of predominant interest are the aspects, the factors,
elements and effects of inequality that are mentioned by the respective authors. Which
role is attributed, for example, to slavery, to global capitalism, or to neoliberalism and
structural adjustment policies when looking at the creation of socioeconomic forms
of inequality in Latin America? And which axes of stratification are addressed? What
is the role that is attributed to issues of “race”, ethnicity and religion, to gender and
sexuality, and to class? Concerning conceptualizations, the primary question is how
the aspects of inequality that are focused on are grasped and theorized. Here, we can
draw on the conceptual vocabulary elaborated by Nancy Fraser, when we ask whether
those aspects are assessed as socioeconomic matters, as cultural matters, as political
matters or as all of the above; and when we furthermore ask whether the general take
on these matters that is proposed in the selected approaches is rather affirmative,
rather transformative or transcending this distinction.
5 Occidentalism for Coronil denotes a mode of representation that “produces polarized and hierarchical
conceptions of the West and its Others and makes them central figures in accounts of global and
local histories” (Coronil 1996: 57). Such conceptions subdivided the world into separate units without
relational histories, hierarchized differences and naturalized them and thereby took part in the
reproduction of existing power asymmetries (cf. Coronil 1996).
6 For an overview, see the edited volumes by Rivera Cusicanqui and Barragán (1997), Castro-Gómez
and Mendieta (1998), Toro and Toro (1999), Rodríguez (2001), Thurner and Guerrero (2003) and
Moraña, Dussel and Jáuregui (2008).
7 For an application of this distinction on questions of intersectionality, see Kerner (2012b).
4.
Aníbal Quijano: From Dependency to Decolonial Thought
As it is widely acknowledged, dependency theory, as it was developed from the 1960s,
has always been a heterogeneous field of thought, combining a rather functionalist
strand and a rather Marxist one. Aníbal Quijano, who was among the first generation
of scholars working with the dependency paradigm, has both been grouped within
the first of these strands (Puhle 1977: 16) and located on the middle ground between
the two (O’Brien 1977: 38f.). Ramón Grosfoguel furthermore qualifies Quijano as one
of the few exceptions to what he sees as a general “underestimation of culture” in
dependentista analysis (Grosfoguel 2000: 367). In this light, it is indeed noteworthy
that Quijano, unlike most of his colleagues, from early on emphasized the role of
racism for the history and present of Latin American realities. He did this in the course
of developing his concept of the “coloniality of power”, which today is of tremendous
prominence in decolonial thought, and has led to a number of accounts analyzing the
coloniality of power-related phenomena, like “La Colonialiad del Saber” (Lander 2000),
the “Coloniality of Being” (Maldonaldo-Torres 2007), the “Coloniality of Being/Power/
Truth/Freedom” (Wynter 2003), or the “Coloniality of Gender” (Lugones 2008). So what
are the basic elements of his approach?
Against the backdrop of the characterization of postcolonial studies that I have
suggested above, claiming that postcolonial scholarship is concerned with the longterm effects of European colonialism and with current forms of imperialism, that
it focuses on global interdependencies and critically addresses North-South power
relations, Quijano is an exemplary postcolonial theorist. Among the central elements
of his analysis is Western imperialism, which he holds to be the successor of what he
calls Eurocentered colonialism. That the former is introduced as the successor of the
latter does not imply that Quijano assumes a full-fledged structural analogy between
both phenomena, though. Eurocentered colonialism he defines as “formal system of
political domination by Western European societies over others” (Quijano 2007: 168).
Western imperialism, by contrast, was not an imposition from the outside, but rather
“an association of social interests between the dominant groups (‘social classes’ and/
or ‘ethnies’) of countries with unequally articulated power” (Quijano 2007: 168). So in
terms of political organization, both forms of rule differ considerably. As will become
apparent, they differ much less with regard to how social power is organized within
them. The lynchpin of this organization of power is dominant social groups: “social
classes and/or ethnies”.
The fact that Quijano at this point refers to two distinct categories of social differentiation,
classes and ethnies, can be interpreted as an indicator for the question of what content
and which axes of stratification he holds to be the most relevant and therefore focuses
his analysis on. For him, class relations – not only, but particularly in Latin America
– are closely entangled with ethnic relations; it is obvious that this entanglement of
relations is one that constitutes inequality. So how did this entanglement come into
being? And how does it work?
As already hinted at, for Quijano the class-and-ethnic-relations entanglement originates
in what he calls Eurocentered colonialism. Eurocentered colonialism established a
naturalized difference classification system to support its power structure, to organize
and rationalize the striking political inequality as well as the division of labor upon
which it was based. The naturalized differences that this classification system produced
were racial, ethnic, or national differences. What is crucial now is that Quijano holds
that as an after-effect of Eurocentered colonialism, both naturalized racial, ethnic and
national notions of difference, as well as forms of power and social discrimination such
assumptions made possible, live on (Quijano 2007). And according to him, this does
not only apply to the national level of Latin American countries, but also to the global
scale, of which he thinks it to be
very clear that the large majority of the exploited, the dominated, the discriminated
against, are precisely the members of the ‘races’, ‘ethnies’, or ‘nations’ into which
the colonized populations […] were categorized in the formative process of
[colonialism’s] world power, from the conquest of America and onward (Quijano
2007: 168f.).
In this light, in a later text Quijano speaks of “colonial/modern Eurocentered capitalism
as a new global power” (Quijano 2000b: 533). Here, the historical continuities that
he assumes become overly apparent. For Quijano terminates the beginning of this
“new global power” half a millennium ago, with the conquest of what today is Latin
America. As its fundamental axis in accordance with his earlier work he identifies the
racial classification of the world population; as its rationality he names Eurocentrism
(cf. Quijano 2000b). Furthermore, he stresses links and mutual reinforcements of
“race” and the division of labor in global capitalism; their effect was a “systematic racial
division of labor”, with both elements articulated in a way that they appeared “naturally
associated” (Quijano 2000b: 536f.). Quijano himself suggests a historical rather than a
natural explanation for how Europe managed to become the central site for the control
of the world marked. For him, the rise of Europe was possible, next to its favorable
geographical location, due to the influx of precious metals and other commodities
from America, all of them produced “by unpaid labor of Indians, blacks, and mestizos”
(Quijano 2000b: 537). Therefore, racial differentiations were indeed instrumental for
the establishment and functioning of the capitalist system of exploitation and the global
distribution of riches. But according to Quijano’s analysis, such differentiations were
precisely not suggesting themselves due to differences in human nature, which further
suggested a racial division of labor, as European race thinking itself would have had it.
According to his analysis, racial differentiations were precisely constructed, imposed
and employed in order to organize and rationalize such a system of exploitation and
maldistribution.
Quijano’s emphasis on Eurocentrism indicates that despite his focus of analysis being
decidedly socio-economic, he also highlights cultural factors. In this light, he underlines
that the beginning of the colonization of Latin America was characterized by genocide,
“a massive and gigantic extermination of the natives”, as well as by systematic cultural
repression (Quijano 2000b: 169). These practices laid the ground for what he calls “the
colonization of the imagination” – the establishment of European culture as universal
cultural model (Quijano 2000b: 169). It is at this point that Quijano introduces the term
coloniality – as the “most general form of domination in the world today, once colonialism
as an explicit political order was destroyed” (Quijano 2000b: 170). Coloniality can be
understood as something like the after-life of colonialism following its death, as the
prevailing of the logics that colonialism once established beyond its formal end. And
with his emphasis on genocide and cultural repression Quijano makes clear that these
logics were not established within terrains and contexts that before were void and
therefore lacking any own logics and culture, but that colonial ways in the course of
violent processes replaced pre-colonial ones.
As stated above, what Quijano has become famous for in postcolonial studies is his
notion of the “coloniality of power” (Quijano 2000b: 171). Power here is to be understood
in the sense of influence on the global scale. The coloniality of power thus means that
contemporary forms of political and social power are tainted by colonial modes of
thought and organization. Given that according to Quijano, “race” differentiations were
at the core of the colonial order, the coloniality of power particularly denotes the global
pervasion of racial knowledge, that is the institutionalization of such knowledge in the
form of social classifications, the construction of identities based on such classifications
and, finally, the continued organizing of the distribution of labor within world capitalism
by racial knowledge (cf. Quijano 2000b). What with an eye on inequality is furthermore
particularly noteworthy about Quijano’s account of the coloniality of power is his
affirmation that against its backdrop, differences are not only seen as natural, but
also as always asymmetric. To the European or Western perception, Quijano writes,
“differences were admitted primarily above all as inequalities in the hierarchical sense
[…]: only European culture is rational, it can contain ‘subjects’ – the rest are not rational,
they cannot be or harbor ‘subjects’” (Quijano 2000b: 173f.). According to his analysis,
the association of colonial ethnocentrism one the one hand and racial classification
systems with global reach on the other hand produced European feelings of something
like a natural superiority. In Europe’s relations to the rest of the world, only the “Orient”
had the status as Europe’s other – while the indigenous populations of both America
and Southern Africa were seen as “primitive” and thus devoid of any noteworthy cultural
heritage. According to Quijano, Eurocentrism as a hegemonic perspective of knowledge
is thus based on two founding myths: first, that Europe was the culmination of world
historical progress and had something like a “patent on modernity”; and second, that
differences between Europe and non-Europe were natural instead of “consequences
of a history of power” (Quijano 2000b: 542f.).
As stated above, Quijano holds that concerning political organization and institution
systems, the end of formal colonialism did indeed make a difference; to him, former
and current forms of government are not the same. Nevertheless, he maintains
that the coloniality of power had noteworthy effects on post-colonial processes of
state formation in Latin America, namely detrimental ones. Generally speaking, he
presupposes an intricate link between the modern nation-state and a certain degree
of democratic relations, an association of processes of modern state formation and of
democratization. This is because democratic participation functioned as a means of
integration, or of “homogenizing people” (Quijano 2000b: 557); and, as it is common
knowledge within political science, a certain degree of integration is a precondition
for modern state formation. Against this backdrop, Quijano holds that since it did not
imply processes of decolonizing and democratizing societies, independence in Latin
America was not a process toward the development of modern nation-states. Rather,
it meant a re-articulation of the coloniality of power over new institutional bases (cf.
Quijano 2000b: 567).
So what are the remedies that Quijano proposes? What are the means against the
continuous re-institutionalization of the coloniality of power that he envisions and
suggests to embrace? Are there alternative modes and models in sight and if so, what
do they look like?
With regard to the cultural aspects of the dismal panorama he presents his readers
with, namely cultural repression and the colonization of the imagination, Quijano
calls for “epistemological decolonization, as decoloniality […] to clear the way for
new intercultural communication […] as the basis of another rationality which may
legitimately pretend to some universality” (Quijano 2007: 177). Western thought
would by such a process be provincialized, to use an expression coded by Indian
historiographer Dipesh Chakrabarty (Chakrabarty 2000), and both challenged and
supplemented by alternative systems of knowledge and morals in order to at some
point produce true inclusivity. What according to Quijano would furthermore ideally
come out of epistemological decolonization was the freedom “to choose between
various cultural orientations” and “to produce, criticize, change, and exchange culture
and society” – as part of “the process of social liberation from all power organized as
inequality, discrimination, exploitation, and as domination” (Quijano 2007: 178).
In an essay dedicated to Latin American indigenous movements, Quijano refers these
ideas to the complex relation of these movements to the state. As what he sees as
their most promising aim, he mentions their call for the redefinition of the respective
states they work within as plurinational (Quijano 2006: 214). This would imply no
less than multiple citizenship – given that in the past, full citizenship status was often
denied to indigenous peoples, who were treated rather as subjects than as citizens.
Furthermore, such plurinationality would entail the chance to create new forms
of democratic participation systems, at least on the sub-state level (Quijano 2006:
214ff.). So interestingly, successful indigenous movements as Quijano envisions them
decidedly go beyond struggles for cultural recognition; they also address the political
sphere of representation. And concerning this sphere, these movements do not only
call for the de facto representation of the entire population, but try out alternative forms
of democracy, as well. So they in fact do not only challenge the current frame of politics,
they also challenge its current set-up.
Challenging the set-up is what Quijano wishes for with regard to the coloniality of
power as well. In the course of a discussion of Latin American revolutionary projects,
he argues in favor of the “socialization of power” – for him “a radical return of the
control over labor/resources/product, over sex/resources/products, over authorities/
institutions/violence, and over intersubjectivity/knowledge/communication to the daily
life of the people” (Quijano 2000b: 573). These four aspects – labor, sex, authority
and intersubjectivity/knowledge – for him are the backbone of any form of state power
(Quijano 2000b: 557). It is noteworthy that with the second aspect, sex/resources/
products, issues of gender come into his analysis. And in fact, Quijano has further
elaborated on the impact of gender issues in an essay on the coloniality of power and
social classifications. Here, he categorically distinguishes racial differentiations, which
he convincingly describes as social constructs referring to phenotype characteristics
without any consequences for the abilities of a person, from gender differentiations,
which he refers back to what he conceives as “atributos biológicos diferenciales”, of
differences based in human nature (Quijano 2000a: 373).
While racial differentiations for him are the principal component of the coloniality of
power, gender is only a side issue of his analysis. The coloniality of gender relations
for Quijano comprises three elements, which all demonstrated the hypocritical base of
bourgeois family values: First, that family and sexuality norms in the colonies allowed
white men sexual access to non-white women, while white women were to be faithful
to their husbands; second, that in Europe, female prostitution allowed for the sexual
liberties of the bourgeois pater familias; and third, that the unity of the Eurocentered
family was contrasted by a constant disintegration of non-white families, particularly
among those people who were enslaved (Quijano 2000a: 377f.). Against the backdrop
of current discussions within the realm of feminist analysis, it is noteworthy that
Quijano clearly alludes to intersections, namely between “race”/class-entanglements
and gender, or, to be more precise, those aspects of gender that he in fact addresses.
But as in the next section on the work of María Lugones I will show in more detail, his
take on gender is a rather limited one. For besides reproducing naturalized notions
of sex differences, it restricts gender, as it is assessed with regard to its relevance
for colonialism and global capitalism, to questions of white male sexual access to
females and of father-son-relations, and thereby to matters of family, sexuality and
reproduction.8 Issues like the naturalization of gender, particularly of femininity norms,
or the gender division of labor, are left out of Quijano’s analysis.
5.
María Lugones: Bringing Gender In
Philosopher and feminist critic María Lugones has built on Quijano’s work in an attempt
to more deeply engender it, to confront and connect it with insights of feminist scholarship.
Lugones in principle affirms Quijano’s notion of the coloniality of power. Nevertheless,
she takes issue with his approach to gender, which she holds to be inadequately reduced
to the control of sexuality, its resources and products (Lugones 2008: 189f.), in other
words to the organization and reproduction patterns of the heterosexual family. To
Lugones, Quijano addresses gender issues in a way that is problematically biological/
dimorphic, hetero-normative as well as not systematic enough in its taking on board
of intersectional insights. Therefore, all in all she qualifies his take on the coloniality
of power as not being sufficiently gender-aware. She herself, by contrast, suggests a
view that perceives gender and the coloniality of power as mutually constitutive; she
thus posits relevant interdependencies not only of “race” and class, as in Quijano,
but of “race”, class, gender and sexuality. In this light, she assumes a “colonial/
8 “La unidad e integración familiar, impuestas como ejes del patrón de familia burguesa del mundo
eurocentrado, fue la contrapartida de la continuada desintegración de las unidades de parentesco
padres-hijos en las ‘razas’ no-‘blancas’”, Quijano writes (Quijano 2000a: 378). Clearly, padres-hijos
must not be translated as “father-sons”, but can also be translated as “parents-children”. Given the
general androcentrism of Quijano’s take on the coloniality of gender relations, it is questionable if the
gender-neutral translation would be the adequate one, though.
modern gender system” with wide ranging subjection effects (Lugones 2008: 186). For
according to her, colonialism did not only establish systems of racial classification, but
also introduced Western gender systems in the world beyond Europe.9 But importantly,
it did not do this by an act of universalizing bourgeois European gender norms. Rather,
it established a highly differentiated system of pluralized gender positions with very
different arrangements for the colonizers and the colonized; to use Lugones’ own
words, it “introduced many genders and gender itself as a colonial concept and mode
of organization of relations of production, property relations, of cosmologies and ways
of knowing” (Lugones 2008: 186). The modern/colonial gender system that Lugones
attempts at theorizing is thereby in itself a dual affair. For once, it has what she calls
a “light” side, the side of the white heterosexual bourgeois family and thus the side of
sexual bimorphism, complementary gender roles organized along the public/private
split and of heteronormativity. The second and “dark” side of the modern/colonial
gender system is, by contrast, constituted by the suppression of alternative ways of
organizing sex, gender and sexuality. According to Lugones, such alternative ways
flourished in various world regions before European colonization. What was put in
their place by colonization were racist modes of dehumanization and exploitation of
colonized females (Lugones 2008: 206f.).
Given Lugones’ adherence to the work of Aníbal Quijano and the resultant large scope
of her critical analysis – the colonial/modern gender system is no less encompassing
than colonial/modern Eurocentered capitalism, and in fact comprises relations of
production, property relations, cosmologies and ways of knowing (Lugones 2008:
186) – it is almost surprising that her programmatic conceptualization of a decolonial
feminism (Lugones 2010) is merely concentrated on the last of these factors, namely
cosmologies and ways of knowing. It must be stressed that her declared point of
departure for alternatives to the system that she opposes are “social organizations
from which people have resisted modern, capitalist modernity”, namely non-modern
ways of organizing “the social, the cosmological, the ecological, the economic, and the
spiritual” (Lugones 2010: 742f.). But once having started off in her search for points
of resistance and decolonial strategies, she treats such alternative modes as holistic,
non-contradictory entities; as modes of organizing the social that can already be fully
captured with regard to the way in which they actually work when merely looking at the
9 This was partly done by help of local men; Lugones speaks of the co-optation of colonized men into
patriarchal roles. See Lugones (2007: 200).
cosmologies and ways of knowing that inform them.10 She neither seems to count with
possible tensions within non-western systems of knowing, nor with possible conflict
within resistant social organizations; the multiplicity that she ascribes to communities
that oppose the coloniality of gender is conceptualized as creative, not also as
possibly destructive or at least debilitating (cf. Lugones 2010: 755). From her own
perspective it therefore does make sense, and in fact shows a certain consistency, that
Lugones concentrates her critical energy on the epistemic realm. What she seems
to miss, though, is the fact that this concentration comes with considerate analytic
self-limitations, since it might actually not be possible to really grasp and change all
elements of the coloniality of gender by going the epistemic way alone.
What is undoubtedly outstanding about her account of a decolonial feminism is her
clear attempt to not only critically analyze the coloniality of gender, but to do this by
decidedly privileging the “perspective of subalternity” (Lugones 2010: 753) for the
purpose of such an analysis. “What I am proposing in working toward a decolonial
feminism”, Lugones writes, “is to learn about each other as resisters to the coloniality
of gender at the colonial difference, without necessarily being an insider to the worlds
of meaning from which resistance to coloniality arises” (Lugones 2010: 753). Thereby,
decolonial feminism almost inevitably becomes a communal affair.
So while for Quijano epistemological decolonization seems to be something that his
own analysis can do without, but rather calls and thus lays the ground for, Lugones
implies that epistemological decolonization was a prerequisite for decolonial feminism;
and we might deduct that for any other form of decolonial critique, as well. While Quijano
developed his critical approach coming from the grand theorizing of the dependency
school, Lugones deliberately draws on feminist positions from communities that she
would qualify as subaltern, among others on African, African-American or NativeAmerican feminist accounts. Thereby, she attempts at bridging and at the same time
undoing, or at least reworking, the colonial difference, which in the course of this
process is to shift from being the organizing principle of the coloniality of gender to
being decolonial feminism’s object of critique. In this way, Lugones openly advocates
for feminist border thinking (Lugones 2010: 753). It is not by surprise but rather by direct
10With regard to gender, this is exactly how Lugones explains her methodology: “I move to read
the social from the cosmologies that inform it, rather than beginning with a gendered reading of
cosmologies informing and constituting perception, motility, embodiment, and relation” (Lugones
2010: 749). At this point, she decidedly wants to prevent the mistake of reading gender into the social
in an uninformed way, and thus in a way that makes it impossible to see gender options beyond the
male/female-split (cf. Lugones 2010: 750). As convincing as this strategy appears, I nevertheless hold
that her suggestion to read the social from the cosmologies that inform it underemphasizes possible
tension within systems of knowing, and possible conflict within resistant social organizations.
reference that this resonates well with the decolonial program of Walter Mignolo’s (cf.
Lugones 2010: 751ff.).
6. Walter Mignolo: Modernity/Coloniality and the Decolonial
Option
Walter Mignolo, currently probably the most prominent author connected to the
modernidad/colonialidad-project, like Lugones draws heavily on Quijano. He employs
the latter’s notions of coloniality to argue that such coloniality was intricately linked to
modernity; in fact, that modernity could not be understood without taking its underside
of coloniality into account. Coloniality, for Mignolo denotes “the logical structure of
colonial domination underlying the Spanish, Dutch, British, and US control of the
Atlantic economy and politics, and from there the control and management of almost
the entire planet” (Mignolo 2005: 7). While Quijano when reasoning about the coloniality
of power is interested in tracing current after-effects of colonialism, particularly of the
colonization of the Americas, Mignolo generalizes the idea of coloniality to name the
logic of modern imperial power per se:
In each of the particular imperial periods of colonialism – whether led by Spain
(mainly in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) or by England (from the
nineteenth century to World War II) or by the US (from the early twentieth
century until now) – the same logic was maintained; only power changed hands
(Mignolo 2005: 7).
The domain of reference of this enlarged logic of coloniality, according to Mignolo
embraces four aspects or realms, which in fact mirror the four aspects that for Quijano
constitute state power, namely labor, sex, authority and intersubjectivity/knowledge.
The realms that Mignolo mentions are first, the economic, in form of the appropriation
of land, the exploitation of labor and the control of finance; second, the political, or the
control of authority; third, the civic, which he holds to refer to the control of gender and
sexuality, and fourth, the epistemic as well as the subjective or personal – here, he
mentions the control of knowledge and subjectivity (cf. Mignolo 2005: 11).
Such coloniality, Mignolo holds, should be seen as “the untold and unrecognized
historical counterpart of modernity” which can neither be disconnected nor undone
otherwise (Mignolo 2005: xi). Therefore, he considers all attempts at “repairing”
modernity, for instance of completing it in order to include all those who at some point in
history despite modernity’s universalistic claims had been excluded, as an inevitably futile
endeavor that in fact could not but “keep on producing coloniality” (Mignolo 2005: xi, xv).
Mignolo in other words assumes that modernity’s inherent problems were precisely not
merely problems of exclusion from a generally good and principally all-encompassing
framework, and thus of an inadequate actualization of modernity’s universalistic claims,
but the universal pretensions of these claims themselves, pretensions that reflected
assumptions of moral self-sufficiency and thereby necessarily implied the de-valuation
of non-modern, or rather non-Western moralities and epistemologies.
When Mignolo holds coloniality to be the untold and unrecognized part of modernity,
he refers to modern self-descriptions from inside and outside of the academic world.
Against such descriptions, as a source of critique of modernity/coloniality and of the
encompassing control it entails, he suggests border thinking, a form of knowledge that
critically reflects on the colonial wound, the damaging effects of colonialism, or, to put it
more broadly, of colonial modernity. When introducing the notion of the colonial wound,
Mignolo draws on the thought of Frantz Fanon – or at least on select elements of it. He
refers to the damnés, the wretched of the earth in Fanon’s theorizing, as “the wounded
of the imperial/colonial world order” (Mignolo 2005: 108). According to Mignolo, from
this perspective coloniality names
the experiences and views of the world and history of those whom Fanon calls
les damnés de la terre (‘the wretched of the earth’, those who have been, and
continue to be, subjected to the standards of modernity). The wretched are defined
by the colonial wound, and the colonial wound, physical and/or psychological, is
a consequence of racism, the hegemonic discourse that questions the humanity
of all those who do not belong to the locus of enunciation (and the geo-politics
of knowledge) of those who assign the standards of classification and assign to
themselves the right to classify (Mignolo 2005: 8, original emphasis).
Differing from Fanon himself, who despite his ardent critique of colonialism abstains
from making general claims about the relation of European colonialism and modern
European thought, Mignolo, by contrast, takes up the figure of the wretched to name
not all those who are subjected to practices of European colonialism, like in Fanon,
but all those who are in a considerably broader sense subjected to the standards
of modernity. For Mignolo, the decolonial project – or the decolonial option, how he
has now been calling it for several years (Mignolo 2011) – implies no less than the
disruption of the discursive forms of coloniality and thus of Western modernity. This
is to be achieved by challenging Eurocentric and modernist thought precisely with
recourse to critical perspectives that take the colonial wound seriously and use it as a
starting point for imagining a different, a pluralized world (Mignolo 2005: 156).
As already mentioned, Mignolo finds the intellectual resources for such an alternative
mode of thought in what he calls border thinking, the work of theorists and social
movements connected to the wretched. Border thinking for Mignolo is inherently
interwoven with subaltern perspectives – to him, “alternatives to modern epistemology
can hardly come only from modern (Western) epistemology itself” (Mignolo 2000: 9).11
Border thinking entails and combines two major elements. First, acts of conceptual
reclaiming and re-signification which are to counter the epistemic violence that modern/
colonial knowledge produced; his example is the work of afro-Andean scholars who
stress concepts of “ancestry” and “lo propio”, one’s own, against Eurocentric models of
history (Mignolo 2005: 112f.); and second, interculturalidad in the sense of epistemic
plurality, which in many countries of Latin America implies the recognition of indigenous
knowledge systems. Mignolo’s prime example for the setting into work of interculturalidad
are projects of bilingual education, for instance the Universidad Intercultural de las
Nacionalidades y Pueblos Indígenas Amawtay Wasi, an institution of higher education
in Ecuador that is closely linked to indigenous movements and in its teaching combines
Spanish and Quechua knowledge systems (Mignolo 2005: 117-128); or the thought of
the Mexican Zapatistas that links Marxist categories to indigenous cosmology (Mignolo
2000: 140). To the Zapatistas’ Subcomandante Marcos, Mignolo also attributes acts
and a stance of “double translation”. Marcos was a double translator in the sense
that on the one hand, he translated local discourses from Chiapas to the Mexican
nation and the global arena, and on the other hand he translated Marxism to the local
population, in a way that Marxist thought could be “infected by Indigenous cosmology”
(Mignolo 2011: 219). According to Mignolo, he thereby “displaced the model implanted
by missionaries at the beginning of the colonial world” (Mignolo 2011: 219). For him,
the Zapatistas put an act of “conceptual delinking from a master frame of reference
situated in Western ways of thinking” into practice (Mignolo 2011: 215).
It remains unclear in this conceptualization how Mignolo envisions the relation between
the two poles of border thinking, namely conceptual reclaiming and interculturalidad;
even though it is most probable that he would assume some kind of productive, or at
least friendly, co-existence, or to even hold acts of reclaiming to be the first step towards
interculturalidad. Unfriendliness and other undesirable phenomena, like violence and
oppression, are not on the radar of his thinking about modes of delinking from the
Western frame; despite the fact that they play a considerable role in today’s world, one
only has to think of the Taliban. Mignolo exclusively looks at those forms of delinking
11One of Mignolo’s prime models of border thinking is the writing of Chicana feminist Gloria Anzaldúa,
who in her bilingual and multiple genre book Borderlands/La Frontera portrays the U.S.-Mexican
border as an open wound, as “una herida abierta where the Third World grates against the first and
bleeds” (Anzaldúa 1987: 3).
that he finds politically promising, and can therefore qualify as decolonial.12 This
resonates with his abstaining from any critical assessment of indigenous knowledge
systems or of other forms of non-Western vision. And this abstaining seems to be less
due to contingent or deliberate neglect than to be a consequence of the premises of
decolonial thought. In fact, Mignolo would most probably refute any critical assessment
driven by external, for instance by universal normative standards, as being part of
the problem, namely for being deeply embedded in what he calls the coloniality of
knowledge.13 And he would do this for three reasons. First, Mignolo is highly skeptical
concerning any exclusive reference to “positive” aspects of European modernity, like
for instance the affirmation of normative justice principles. To him, as long as they are
universalistic, such aspects are irreducible from the negative aspects of modernity,
its colonial underside. Second, he is interested in a recourse to border thinking and
indigenous knowledge in the sense of what Michel Foucault in a lecture from 1976
has called an “insurrection of subjugated knowledges” – as a return of buried historical
contents and as a re-emergence of local “popular knowledge” that at some point had
been disqualified as insufficiently elaborated, but that now, with its re-emergence,
could become the basis of a locally grounded new form of social critique (Foucault
2003: 6f.; Mignolo 2000: 19f.).14 In this sense, Mignolo sees in the perspective of those
12In his 2011 monograph The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options,
Mignolo distinguishes five different paths towards the future, the relation of which he sees as one
of “struggles, negotions, competitions, and collaborations”, but also of one without a winner other
than “the agreement that global futures shall be polycentric and non-capitalist” (Mignolo 2011: 33).
The five trajectories are dewesternization, rewesternization, reorientations of the left, as well as
decolonial and spiritual options. In his explication of the reorientiations of the left, he briefly mentions
“radical political organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah”, which together with “progressive Muslims”
he characterizes as the equivalent of the non-European left (cf. Mignolo 2011: 43). But apart from this
brief reference, his account of alternative trajectories to rewesternization appears to be inherently
emancipatory.
13Walter Mignolo has been repeatedly criticized for his reductionism – particularly with regard to his
dichotomous take on modernity and its always already emancipatory outside (Domingues 2009;
Sousa Santos 2010). Furthermore, the simplified take on gender that Lugones has taken issue with
regarding the work of Aníbal Quijano can be said to also apply to Mignolo, who, not unlike Quijano,
simply lists the “control of gender and sexuality” as one among seven elements of the “coloniality of
power” (Mignolo 2005: 32), and on the other hand treats feminist considerations as a quasi-natural
ingredient of what he calls “border thinking” (cf. Mignolo 2000: 267ff.). What is questionable about
these contributions is not that they do address gender. Rather, it is the way in which they address
gender. For they neglect the debates on intersectionality which question the simple parallelization
of different forms of power and axes of stratification (cf. e.g. Roth 2013; Kerner 2009, 2012c),
postcolonial considerations on the ambivalences of colonialism from a feminist perspective (cf. e.g.
Spivak 1988; Narayan 1997), as well as Latin American (and Latin Americanist) feminist contributions
that strive for a nuanced take on pre-colonial gender relations (e.g. Hernández and Murguialday
1992) or deliberately endorse liberal and poststructuralist, and thus “Western” thought (e.g. Lamas
2006). Therefore, such takes on gender clearly fall behind current debates in gender studies and
feminist theorizing – and I hold that it might profit from taking some of these considerations and the
ensuing complications on board.
14For a harsh critique of Foucault’s attempt to resurrect popular knowledge for its supposed disregard
of the effects of ideology as well as of the power relation between intellectuals and the people, see
Spivak (1988).
who have been silenced in the course of the making of Latin America the possibility
of radical change (Mignolo 2005: xv). Third, finally, he attributes an inherent value
to what he calls a “pluri-versity” of knowledge and values (Mignolo 2000: 222). To
him, such diversity counters the hegemony of modern/colonial thought, and it does so
independent of the respective contents of the differing forms of knowledge he wants
to co-exist.
7.
Differences of Inequality and their Critique: Quijano, Lugones
and Mignolo
As in the preceding sections I have hopefully been able to demonstrate, the foci of the
approaches of Quijano, Lugones, and Mignolo differ considerably – despite the fact
that they in one way or another can all be grouped into the field of decolonial thought.
As I have already argued, Lugones’ account of the coloniality of gender seems much
less directed towards the socio-economic and the political than Quijano’s account of
the coloniality of power, since she deliberately addresses her subject matter from the
side of cosmologies, and thus of the cultural; and in a way, something similar can be
said of Mignolo’s notion of modernidad/colonialidad, which methodologically privileges
epistemic and discursive matters, as well. Furthermore, it is noteworthy that Lugones
and Mignolo, who both build on the critical analysis of the coloniality of power that
Quijano has developed, do this in very different ways. While Lugones, taking gender
seriously, decidedly complicates Quijano’s account, Mignolo is rather interested in
broadening it – and thus in making it more general, in making it to encompass all of
modernity and any form of Western influence in the world.
So what do the three authors contribute to the what- and the how-questions of
interdependent inequalities, what can we draw from their approaches when we
are interested in understanding and possibly challenging such inequalities in Latin
America, and possibly also elsewhere? In order to answer these questions, let me
start with the what-question, the question of axes and factors of inequality, and from
there lead over to the how-question, the question of how interdependent inequalities
are conceptualized by the three authors. In a second step, I will address the remedies
to inequality that Quijano, Lugones and Mignolo endorse.
With regard to Quijano, what is particularly noteworthy is the strong focus that he
attributes to racism for the formation and the order of the world as we know it, which
for him is a world structured by the coloniality of power and manifesting itself as
colonial/modern Eurocentered capitalism. Quijano holds racism, particularly racial
classifications and hierarchizations on the one hand and global capitalism on the other
hand as intricately interwoven, and therefore at least historically as coterminous. He
shows how a specific knowledge – namely of racial distinctions – in the course of
European colonialism was institutionalized with reference to what within the logics
of intersectionality research one most probably would call other axes of stratification;
in other words, how “race”, how ideas about racial differences, were employed to
organize the division of labor and thereby became coterminous with class as well as
with citizenship status. And this applies both to the national level in various colonies
around the globe, particularly in Latin America, and to the configuration of geopolitics,
and therefore to the global level. Furthermore, Quijano suggests that this link, or rather
its primary instrument and effect, namely the racial division of labor, has historically
often hindered democracy in Latin American states; for it was responsible for social
polarizations too strong and too naturalized to allow strong democratic systems to
flourish. With recourse to Nancy Fraser’s analytic distinction of different aspects
of inequality we can therefore stress that as elements and effects of the coloniality
of power, Quijano identifies socio-economic, cultural as well as political aspects of
inequality, the basis of which is the link of “race” and labor.
Lugones, for her part, follows Quijano’s suggestion to analytically link “race” and labor,
but stresses the importance of additionally, and systematically, taking the role of gender
into account. According to her, colonialism did not only impose a particular racial order
on the world; it also dramatically influenced the terrain of gender, understood in a broad
way as encompassing naturalized notions of sex, gender norms, as well as sexuality
norms. Likewise, according to Lugones, the coloniality of power, which consists of
“race” and class elements, is intricately linked to gender. She therefore convincingly
suggests that in order to understand the particular formations of interdependent
inequalities shaping our contemporary world, a gendered analysis is crucial.
Mignolo, finally, does not focus on a particular set of axes of stratification at all. For
him, modernity/coloniality is a form of power that affects all aspects of world society,
namely the economic, the political, the civic and the epistemic. Compared to Quijano,
Mignolo more strongly emphasizes the effects of Eurocentrism, though. While Quijano
seems to be most concerned with the racial division of labor, for Mignolo, who in the
diagnostic segments of his work draws heavily on Quijano’s analysis, the focus is
particularly turned to the colonization of minds and the imagination. This does not
mean that his approach would only cover cultural aspects and neglect socio-economic
and political ones. But not unlike Lugones, Mignolo addresses the socio-economic
and the political rather indirectly via epistemic and discursive formations. For him,
the struggle is one between entire, supposedly homogenous, systems of thought and
societal organization, and not one for improvements of distinct aspects of how in a
particular society the socio-economic, the cultural, or the political is organized.
Given the complexities of our contemporary world and of the multiply entangled or at
least interacting societies that constitute it, it seems questionable that the assumption of
homogeneity can lead to entirely adequate assessments of our world and its societies.
What is noteworthy about Mignolo’s and Lugones’ elaborations on Quijano’s concept
of the coloniality of power, however, is that they convincingly stress that matters of
epistemology, knowledge systems and world view in fact do play an important role in
shaping global inequalities, and that inequality matters cannot be reduced to issues
concerning the economy and the division of labor or the political. First, because the
hierarchization of the economy and the political is organized with recourse to epistemic
means, namely racial and gender differentiations meant to naturalize and thus to
legitimize inequality in these spheres, rendering such differences to be differences of
inequality; second, because European colonialism, which institutionalized entangled
inequalities on the global scale, worked by delegitimizing pre-colonial knowledge
systems and replacing them with colonial ones.
So which remedy do Quijano, Lugones and Mignolo suggest? How do they imagine
promising ways of undoing inequalities and in which ways do their accounts differ from
each other in this regard? Quijano’s ideas span from epistemological decolonization to
a very broad notion of a “socialization of power”, which would in fact combine measures
of what Fraser calls socialism with far-reaching epistemic change. Concerning the
latter, which refers to the sphere of culture, it seems that what Quijano favors combines
measures of affirmation – the flourishing of non-Western thought, of what he calls
cultural orientations and cosmic visions – with means of deconstruction, namely, of
Eurocentrism and of the Eurocentric tendencies of European, or Western, thought.
It remains unclear from his texts how Quijano imagines the flourishing part of this
scenario, if he rather envisions a rehabilitation of subjugated knowledges, as does
Mignolo, or a re-construction or re-invention of alternative epistemologies, assuming
that colonialism has not left much pre-colonial thought entirely intact. Furthermore,
like Mignolo, Quijano seems to attribute an inherent value to such knowledge, and
does not show much interest in assessing it for ways in which it may itself stand for
injustice, inequality, or a lack of freedom, for instance with regard to gender. What is
noteworthy, though, is the way in which affirmation is meant to lead to transformation
in the scenario that Quijano sketches, for he does not envision the affirmation of nonWestern epistemologies in the sense of multiculturalism, in which the right to follow its
own path is attributed to each community. Rather, he sees it as a potential source of
intercultural communication and thus of moral interaction, which at least potentially could
lead to a new form of universality. It comes as no surprise that for such a scenario to
appear realistic, the deconstruction of Eurocentric modes of thought seems necessary.
At the same time, intercultural communication could lead to more deconstruction of
Eurocentrism – for it made the existence of a noteworthy intellectual life beyond the
Western world all too apparent.15
As shown above, Lugones argues in a similar way as Quijano on this point, and doing
so even goes a step further, for she particularly underlines the communal prerequisites
of decolonial feminism – the communities being necessarily heterogeneous, and
potentially transcending colonial differentiations. In this, she clearly differs from
Mignolo, who with regard to such acts of transcendence seems much more pessimistic
and therefore decidedly more modest. Mignolo does not even attempt at imagining
broad-scale social and political transformation, but rather believes in the co-existence
of different political trajectories with their respective spheres of influence. In this sense,
the decolonial option, the trajectory that he endorses himself, has a decidedly partial
or local focus, as well. He directs his hopes to movements of particular communities
that are engaged in border thinking and delink from colonial modernity in order to live
alternative modes of being. He does characterize such an engagement as “epistemic
and political projects” (Mignolo 2011: xv), which indicates that he does have more
than cultural politics in mind when he argues in favor of the decolonial trajectory.
Nevertheless, the politics involved here are much less state-oriented than, for instance,
those in Quijano’s approach.
While the latter clearly supports calls for plurinational states with multiple citizenship,
Mignolo for the most part abstains from such demands to restructure nation states to
be able to accommodate their entire populations, and to assure the participation of
everybody. Even though he is not against such claims, he nevertheless asserts that
“delinking shall take place at the epistemic level before confronting authority (e.g., state)
and the economy” (Mignolo 2011: 315). Accordingly, such acts of delinking are where he
concentrates his scholarly energy. In this sense, he places high hopes in movements,
communities and world-views that co-exist in what he calls a pluriversal way and that
may or may not manage to bring a particular issue to the forefront of state or even
15Boaventura de Sousa Santos has introduced the notion of translation for describing such forms of
communication. To him, the work of translation is the alternative to general theories. He does not
want to give up on basic concepts of Western universalism, like human dignity. But he problematizes
instances in which the West claims the monopoly for advanced theorizations of such concepts.
Against such claims, he suggests the translation of basic concerns of such notions between different
traditions of thought, for instance the Western, the Islamic and the Hindu tradition, which could by
comparison potentially point to flaws in all of these conceptualizations. As basic precondition for
such an act of translation he mentions a stance of theoretical modesty, and of interdependency:
“The recognition of reciprocal incompleteness and weakness is a condition-sine-qua-non of a crosscultural dialogue”, he declares (Sousa Santos 2005: 18).
global politics. The prime examples he gives are the initiatives around the concept of
buen vivir by Evo Morales in Bolivia and Zapatista self-organizing principles in Mexico.
So with regard to Nancy Fraser’s distinction between affirmative and transformative
ways of addressing injustice concerning representation, the decolonial option that
Mignolo favors is somewhere in the middle. From the perspective of the state, or of
world society, with its local focus it seems to be mostly affirmative, but to come with
transformative potentials; but looked at it from a local, a communal perspective, it
promises far-reaching transformation. What is important to mention is that compared
with Quijano, who aspires a new form of universality, Mignolo strives for the opposite:
“The desirable hegemony is the hegemony of truth in parenthesis that defines the
horizon of pluriversality as a universal project”, he states; and: “The Zapatistas taught
many of us that to change the world as it is may be an impossible task, but to build a
world in which many worlds would coexist is a possible task” (Mignolo 2011: 44, 54).
One can only hope that such worlds would be good worlds.
8.
Blurring Distinctions, Decolonizing Inequality Research
As I have attempted to show in the last section, the decolonial approaches that we owe
to Quijano, Lugones, and Mignolo, address entangled forms of inequality in distinct
and complex ways. Doing so, they in one respect or the other, and either directly or
indirectly, cover socioeconomic, cultural, as well as political aspects of such inequalities;
and they do so with transformative intent. The means and measures of transformation
they suggest, however, at least with regard to cultural and political aspects seem to be
rather affirmative than transformative in nature. Thereby, they mismatch, or transcend
and blur, the distinction between affirmative and transformative remedies that Nancy
Fraser has suggested – a distinction that assumes that a particular measure is either
the one, or the other, but rather not both.
Table 2: Aspects of Inequality and Forms of Remedy According to Quijano,
Lugones and Mignolo
Aspects of Socioeconomic
Inequality (Redistribution)
Cultural
(Recognition)
Political
(Representation)
Forms of
Remedy
Affirmative
Quijano
Lugones
Mignolo
Quijano
Transformative Quijano
↓
↓
←
↓
↓
→
Source: Own elaboration.
Against this backdrop, we can conclude that Fraser’s distinction proves imminently
helpful to identify when, and in which way, particular accounts of inequality seem
reduced and thus incomplete, or, as in the cases of Lugones and Mignolo, either in their
diagnostic or in their prescriptive parts privilege particular, for instance cultural aspects
of inequality over socioeconomic and political aspects. Nevertheless, when applied to
Latin American postcolonial theories, Fraser’s distinction also comes to its limits, for it
does not cover those moments in which cultural or political affirmation is not perceived
as the goal, but rather as the starting point for further-reaching transformation.
There is another point at which decolonial theories seem to transcend and challenge
Fraser’s approach. This second point follows from decolonial theories’ consistent
global scope that leads them to perceive not only problems of representation as
inherently globalized, as in the case of Fraser’s, but also problems of redistribution
and of recognition. To treat the latter as issues that predominantly occur and therefore
are to be assessed within the realm of particular nation states is a legacy of inequality
research that is not peculiar to Fraser’s theorizing, but that is rather characteristic
of Euro-Atlantic social sciences and the methodological nationalism upon which they
are often based.16 Latin American postcolonial theories, by contrast, deliberately
16 As already stated in the introductory section, Fraser herself has departed from this tradition with the
essays that constitute her book Scales of Justice. Furthermore, see her article focused on social
exclusion and the “global poor”, or rather the “transnational precariat” (Fraser 2010).
take the colonial history of current structures and configurations into account. Given
that European colonialism institutionalized not only local or national, but also global
relations of inequality, and that such relations comprise and combine socioeconomic,
cultural and political aspects, postcolonial theories that address and tackle these
relations can therefore be said to decolonize inequality research; that is, to point to its
analytic restrictions and to the forms of inequality it precisely leaves unaddressed by
restricting its analytic focus. They might not address and problematize all there is to be
addressed and problematized with regard to the socioeconomic, the cultural and the
political aspects of differences of inequality as such; nevertheless, their contribution
seems indispensable.
9.
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Working Papers published since February 2011:
1.
Therborn, Göran 2011: “Inequalities and Latin America: From the Enlightenment
to the 21st Century”.
2.
Reis, Elisa 2011: “Contemporary Challenges to Equality”.
3.
Korzeniewicz, Roberto Patricio 2011: “Inequality: On Some of the Implications
of a World-Historical Perspective”.
4.
Braig, Marianne; Costa, Sérgio und Göbel, Barbara 2013: “Soziale Ungleichheiten
und globale Interdependenzen in Lateinamerika: eine Zwischenbilanz”.
5.
Aguerre, Lucía Alicia 2011: “Desigualdades, racismo cultural y diferencia
colonial”.
6.
Acuña Ortega, Víctor Hugo 2011: “Destino Manifiesto, filibusterismo y
representaciones de desigualdad étnico-racial en las relaciones entre Estados
Unidos y Centroamérica”.
7.
Tancredi, Elda 2011: “Asimetrías de conocimiento científico en proyectos
ambientales globales. La fractura Norte-Sur en la Evaluación de Ecosistemas
del Milenio”.
8.
Lorenz, Stella 2011: “Das Eigene und das Fremde: Zirkulationen und
Verflechtungen zwischen eugenischen Vorstellungen in Brasilien und
Deutschland zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts”.
9.
Costa, Sérgio 2011: “Researching Entangled Inequalities in Latin America: The
Role of Historical, Social, and Transregional Interdependencies”.
10.
Daudelin, Jean and Samy, Yiagadeesen 2011: “‘Flipping’ Kuznets: Evidence from
Brazilian Municipal Level Data on the Linkage between Income and
Inequality”.
11.
Boatcă, Manuela 2011: “Global Inequalities: Transnational Processes and
Transregional Entanglements”.
12.
Rosati, Germán 2012: “Un acercamiento a la dinámica de los procesos de
apropiación/expropiación. Diferenciación social y territorial en una estructura
agraria periférica, Chaco (Argentina) 1988-2002”.
13.
Ströbele-Gregor, Juliana 2012: “Lithium in Bolivien: Das staatliche LithiumProgramm, Szenarien sozio-ökologischer Konflikte und Dimensionen sozialer
Ungleichheit”.
14.
Ströbele-Gregor, Juliana 2012: “Litio en Bolivia. El plan gubernamental de
producción e industrialización del litio, escenarios de conflictos sociales y
ecológicos, y dimensiones de desigualdad social”.
15.
Gómez, Pablo Sebastián 2012: “Circuitos migratorios Sur-Sur y Sur-Norte en
Paraguay. Desigualdades interdependientes y remesas”.
16.
Sabato, Hilda 2012: “Political Citizenship, Equality, and Inequalities in the Formation
of the Spanish American Republics”.
17.
Manuel-Navarrete, David 2012: “Entanglements of Power and Spatial
Inequalities in Tourism in the Mexican Caribbean”.
18.
Góngora-Mera, Manuel Eduardo 2012: “Transnational Articulations of Law and
Race in Latin America: A Legal Genealogy of Inequality“.
19.
Chazarreta, Adriana Silvina 2012: “El abordaje de las desigualdades en un
contexto de reconversión socio-productiva. El caso de la inserción internacional
de la vitivinicultura de la Provincia de Mendoza, Argentina“.
20.
Guimarães, Roberto P. 2012: “Environment and Socioeconomic Inequalities in
Latin America: Notes for a Research Agenda”.
21.
Ulloa, Astrid 2012: “Producción de conocimientos en torno al clima. Procesos
históricos de exclusión/apropiación de saberes y territorios de mujeres y pueblos
indígenas”.
22.
Canessa, Andrew 2012: “Conflict, Claim and Contradiction in the New Indigenous
State of Bolivia”.
23.
Latorre, Sara 2012: “Territorialities of Power in the Ecuadorian Coast: The
Politics of an Environmentally Dispossessed Group”.
24.
Cicalo, André 2012: “Brazil and its African Mirror: Discussing ‘Black’
Approximations in the South Atlantic”.
25.
Massot, Emilie 2012: “Autonomía cultural y hegemonía desarrollista en la
Amazonía peruana. El caso de las comunidades mestizas-ribereñas del AltoMomón”.
26.
Wintersteen, Kristin 2012: “Protein from the Sea: The Global Rise of Fishmeal
and the Industrialization of Southeast Pacific Fisheries, 1918-1973”.
27.
Martínez Franzoni, Juliana and Sánchez-Ancochea, Diego 2012: “The Double
Challenge of Market and Social Incorporation: Progress and Bottlenecks in
Latin America”.
28.
Matta, Raúl 2012: “El patrimonio culinario peruano ante UNESCO. Algunas
reflexiones de gastro-política”.
29.
Armijo, Leslie Elliott 2012: “Equality and Multilateral Financial Cooperation in
the Americas”.
30.
Lepenies, Philipp 2012: “Happiness and Inequality: Insights into a Difficult
Relationship – and Possible Political Implications”.
31.
Sánchez, Valeria 2012: “La equidad-igualdad en las políticas sociales
latinoamericanas. Las propuestas de Consejos Asesores Presidenciales
chilenos (2006-2008)”.
32.
Villa Lever, Lorenza 2012: “Flujos de saber en cincuenta años de Libros de
Texto Gratuitos de Historia. Las representaciones sobre las desigualdades
sociales en México”.
33.
Jiménez, Juan Pablo y López Azcúnaga, Isabel 2012: “¿Disminución de la
desigualdad en América Latina? El rol de la política fiscal”.
34.
Gonzaga da Silva, Elaini C. 2012: “Legal Strategies for Reproduction of
Environmental Inequalities in Waste Trade: The Brazil – Retreaded Tyres
Case”.
35.
Fritz, Barbara and Prates, Daniela 2013: “The New IMF Approach to Capital
Account Management and its Blind Spots: Lessons from Brazil and South
Korea”.
36.
Rodrigues-Silveira, Rodrigo 2013: “The Subnational Method and Social
Policy Provision: Socioeconomic Context, Political Institutions and Spatial
Inequality”.
37.
Bresser-Pereira, Luiz Carlos 2013: “State-Society Cycles and Political Pacts in
a National-Dependent Society: Brazil”.
38.
López Rivera, Diana Marcela 2013: “Flows of Water, Flows of Capital:
Neoliberalization and Inequality in Medellín’s Urban Waterscape”.
39.
Briones, Claudia 2013: “Conocimientos sociales, conocimientos académicos.
Asimetrías, colaboraciones autonomías”.
40.
Dussel Peters, Enrique 2013: “Recent China-LAC Trade Relations: Implications
for Inequality?”.
41.
Backhouse, Maria; Baquero Melo, Jairo and Costa, Sérgio 2013: “Between
Rights and Power Asymmetries: Contemporary Struggles for Land in Brazil and
Colombia”.
42.
Geoffray, Marie Laure 2013: “Internet, Public Space and Contention in Cuba:
Bridging Asymmetries of Access to Public Space through Transnational
Dynamics of Contention”.
43.
Roth, Julia 2013: “Entangled Inequalities as Intersectionalities: Towards an
Epistemic Sensibilization”.
44.
Sproll, Martina 2013: “Precarization, Genderization and Neotaylorist Work:
How Global Value Chain Restructuring Affects Banking Sector Workers in
Brazil”.
45.
Lillemets, Krista 2013: “Global Social Inequalities: Review Essay”.
46.
Tornhill, Sofie 2013: “Index Politics: Negotiating Competitiveness Agendas in
Costa Rica and Nicaragua”.
47.
Caggiano, Sergio 2013: “Desigualdades divergentes. Organizaciones de la
sociedad civil y sindicatos ante las migraciones laborales”.
48.
Figurelli, Fernanda 2013: “Movimientos populares agrarios. Asimetrías, disputas
y entrelazamientos en la construcción de lo campesino”.
49.
D’Amico, Victoria 2013: “La desigualdad como definición de la cuestión social
en las agendas trasnacionales sobre políticas sociales para América Latina.
Una lectura desde las ciencias sociales”.
50.
Gras, Carla 2013: “Agronegocios en el Cono Sur. Actores sociales, desigualdades
y entrelazamientos transregionales”.
51.
Lavinas, Lena 2013: “Latin America: Anti-Poverty Schemes Instead of Social
Protection”.
52.
Guimarães, Antonio Sérgio A. 2013: “Black Identities in Brazil: Ideologies and
Rhetoric”.
53.
Boanada Fuchs, Vanessa 2013: “Law and Development: Critiques from a
Decolonial Perspective”.
54.
Araujo, Kathya 2013: “Interactive Inequalities and Equality in the Social Bond: A
Sociological Study of Equality”.
55.
Reis, Elisa P. and Silva, Graziella Moraes Dias 2013: “Global Processes and
National Dilemmas: The Uncertain Consequences of the Interplay of Old and
New Repertoires of Social Identity and Inclusion”.
56.
Poth, Carla 2013: “La ciencia en el Estado. Un análisis del andamiaje regulatorio
e institucional de las biotecnologías agrarias en Argentina”.
57.
Pedroza, Luicy 2013: “Extensiones del derecho de voto a inmigrantes en
Latinoamérica: ¿contribuciones a una ciudadanía política igualitaria? Una
agenda de investigación”.
58.
Leal, Claudia and Van Ausdal, Shawn 2013: “Landscapes of Freedom and
Inequality: Environmental Histories of the Pacific and Caribbean Coasts of
Colombia”.
59.
Martín, Eloísa 2013: “(Re)producción de desigualdades y (re)producción de
conocimiento. La presencia latinoamericana en la publicación académica
internacional en Ciencias Sociales”.
60.
Kerner, Ina 2013: “Differences of Inequality: Tracing the Socioeconomic, the
Cultural and the Political in Latin American Postcolonial Theory”.
desiguALdades.net
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